Nevada’s Fight Over Water Continues

(CN) – The Southern Nevada Water Authority must reopen the public debate in its bid to pump billions of gallons of water from northeastern Nevada to serve the Las Vegas Valley, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority submitted applications to pump the water from rural parts of the state when the Las Vegas Valley was one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. But the state Supreme Court ruled in February that the state’s former engineer broke the law by allowing the water authority in 2007 to withdraw 13 billion gallons of water a year from the northeastern part of the state. “[T]he proper and most equitable remedy is that the state engineer must … reopen the protest period,” Justice James Hardesty wrote in his 19-page opinion.